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yeah its your awareness or your soul. u are the only one that knows for sure u exhist or u are aware of your surroundings. that cannot be proven by any scientific means and u cannot beleive in it because u yourself know u exhist. kinda is cool to think that everyday we can only beleive that others around us are aware of their surroundings because we cannot scientificaly prove that they are.

good point Pollux but can we not take a computer program and monitor it's behavior as it goes through its processes? if so then does this meen the computer has some sort of self awareness?the "self awareness" from what i can understand of it, is not a physical attribute but a so deemed the term "spiritual" attribute. but for whatever the name may be, the self awareness for what i understand of it of course, is not a part of the physical world. This in a manner of speaking proves to me and should to many others that there is something beyond our physical world whether it be spiritual or whatever one may call it. in essence our ability to be self aware IS a miracle. the defenition of miracle states - an event that seems impossible to explain by natural laws and so is regarded as supernatural in origin or as an act of God. it is IMPOSSIBLE for u or anyone else alive to explain the reasons they are aware of their surroundings. (i love this ridle because it can spawn so many different questions of our exhistance)

(1) Statement: There is awareness.
Justification: If you can be aware of disputing my claim that there is awareness, you've just proven it correct for your situation at least. (If on the other hand you aren't aware of disputing the claim, you won't be able to bother me.)

(2) Deduction from statement in (1): There is something which the awareness is of.
Justification: "Awareness" must inherently have an object or it isn't awareness. The word requires by definition that there be something to be aware of in order for there to be awareness.

(3) Stipulation: that which the awareness is of, deduced in (2), shall be called "me".

Asguard, "I think therefore I am" was Rene Descartes' way of managing to screw up even the simplest of things. No one debates the "I am" conclusion, but as far as logicaly supporting the idea that "I am" his statement is absolutely useless. By saying "I think" he's already assumed himself, and attributed this strange undefined action to himself, without giving justification. He's using the premis that he exists and is doing an action called thought in order to prove that he exists... just another of his many illogical moves.

That's either cause or effect of subjective experience of thought, but obviously isn't subjective experience itself. That's why neurologists conduct their experiments by asking people to report their experiences and then matching up reports with MRIs and the like. If the actual thoughts were in the electrical signals, they'd just look in and see an electrical signal yelling out in pain, and they'd know that's the experience of pain without ever having needed to ask a person at any time what they're experiencing.

i have been told that quantum computers in theory are similar to our brains. somewhere between 2017 - 2020, supposedly our technoledgy in the silicon area will run out of improvments because we will have come to a point where we cannot make things any smaller without causing electricity to flow freely. so with this happening, the next step in computers is to be quantum computers. if it's true that the quantum computer is similar to our brains, i wonder if programs built for this type of computer will some how spawn its own self awareness. i know i must be missing several points here but this is what i was told from a friend in the AI department of Harvard University. any one know anything about this stuff?

Hoth are u saying that u can prove that u exist? im unsure as to what u are saying. the only way that i think u can possibly know someone else is aware of their surroundings and that they are not just some form of "if this then that" type of program, u would have to be able to join that person in his/her existance in order to truely know that they are not lying to u. know what i meen? and that is not possible to do....well that we know of.

Originally posted by Aware
Hoth are u saying that u can prove that u exist? im unsure as to what u are saying. the only way that i think u can possibly know someone else is aware of their surroundings and that they are not just some form of "if this then that" type of program, u would have to be able to join that person in his/her existance in order to truely know that they are not lying to u. know what i meen? and that is not possible to do....well that we know of.

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I'm saying I can prove to me that I exist, not that I can prove to you that I exist. I guess I misinterpreted the question? I can't prove that someone else (like you) exists. I can only extrapolate evidence for the existence of other conscious selves based on observing that people have bodies and brains that look much like mine. From knowing that, I can make the assumption that similar physical structures produce similar results, including the result of thought and awareness of thought. Unfortunately that rests on a non-proveable, even if generally agreed on, assumption of a causal connection between physical structures and mental structures.

When it comes to computers spawning awareness... perhaps, perhaps not. My answer would be yes in theory but unlikely in practice. We could never know for sure, really. We haven't even come to any agreement on which animals are and aren't conscious, so obviously we don't know what level of complexity we think would have to be involved. (I'm not convinced humans have the intellectual capacity to create something anywhere near as complex as the brain anyhow though.)

exactly what i think!!!!!! i think u are the first person to tell this back to me. i find it extremely fascinating that only U can prove to yourself U exist but u cannot prove it to others. i wonder if all human beings are aware of their surroundings. kinda reaching but there is no way to know that all are aware, technicaly, we only beleive they are.